Stephen, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the RDF at the time of writing:

"The RDF is said to be Steve Jobs' ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of superficial charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. RDF is said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and makes them believe that the task at hand is possible."

What Stephen's talking about when he mentions the RDF, however, is "The field that influences Microsoft employees and product designers to make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of technology, computers and devices by the world."

No, Stephen, when your product designers make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of technology, that's called incompetence.

Tuesday, 11 January 2011

For quite a while now I've been noticing that everyone who works at Microsoft seems to have some sort of communication disability resulting in a stream of sentences that are either incomprehensible, obfuscated, incoherent, nonsensical, delusional or plain outright WTF.

In a wonderful example of "The Fish Rots From the Head", Steve Ballmer recently invented "dis-synergy". Ironically, the first thing that popped into my head when I first heard "dis-synergy" was Windows 7 on "Slates", the same dead horse Ballmer has been beating for a couple of years now.

"Unless Apple has also developed some new type of power source, such as nuclear cells or magical hamsters on tiny spinning wheels for the iPad, don’t expect the claims about battery life to hold true."